Oscar Cleanup: I'M NOT THERE review by Dr. Royce Clemens

I'M NOT THERE

*** out of 4

Rated R

Directed by Todd Haynes

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: Best Supporting Actress-Cate Blanchett

Lives do not flow, but are rather a collection of loosely strung together cataclisms and revelations. Our tastes, our loves, our sense of morality and and even the very colors we see the world with are subject not only to change, but to violent upheaval. Our personal apocalypses are exactly that, and the fragile web connecting us to others shakes as you can see out from yourself, but they can't see in. We are six billion unique souls on the big blue cesspool, united in only a few fundamental ways. One of which being that we cannot guarantee that we will be the same person year to year. Day to day. Minute to minute.

But most of us don't undergo these changes publicly, and NO ONE ever veered from personality to personality like Bob Dylan. Todd Haynes' genre deconstruction of the music-biopic is I'M NOT THERE, and he takes the concept that we are different people at different points in time quite literally, as he casts six actors to portray Dylan at seperate junctures. From awkward young folkie (Christian Bale) to life in the media crosshairs after going electric (Cate Blanchett) to his first marriage (Heath Ledger) to his late movie-actor persona (Richard Gere). The result is fascinating and exhilarating, to be sure. But it's also unsettling. For well over forty years many of us have looked to Dylan for some kind of inspiration or direction. It turns out that his many chameleonic shifts in public persona were not calculated. He was just as fucked up and schizophrenic as the rest of us are.

I'm not going to go into the conventional plot summary because there's no coventional plot. The Dylans are all under psudonyms like Jude Quinn (Blanchett) or Jack Rollins (Bale), but those who have followed Dylan can spot where and when these Dylans correlate with the real one. It's like a Greatest Hits album with a pulse. For those of us in the initiated, we can sing along. For the noobs, it's a great place to start.

On the critical side, I can say that I'M NOT THERE is a very well made and well-acted motion picture. Haynes switches from black and white to different color saturations to match not the times, but our collective perceptions of them. I'M NOT THERE, after all, isn't about the man, but how we all SAW the man.

On the acting end, stealing the movie without leaving so much as a whiff of scent is young Marcus Carl Franklin as the pre-Greenwich Dylan that he all wanted us so desperately to believe he was, riding the rails like a hobo and singing about the plight of the downtrodden. But if there's a weak link in the six Dylans, it's Cate Blanchett as the arrogant and preening fuck from the '67 DON'T LOOK BACK era. This isn't to say that Blanchett isn't good in the role, but she seems to be the only one actively doing "Bob Dylan." At least when Bale does his mimicry of Dylan, he does it naturally, constantly stuttering his words and hiding from the gaze of anyone who might be looking.

But I'm also a Dylan fan, and I for one am curious as to why any biography of Dylan, written or produced, seems to think Dylan died sometime in the eighties. He's still alive, well and is actually enjoying a late inning resurgence. He's doing some of his best work right now. Christ, I'd take LOVE AND THEFT over BLOOD ON THE TRACKS any day of the week. And the present day Bob could be played by the dug-up corpse of Vincent Price... Or failing that, the real Bob Dylan, being as they look so damn similar.

But where my Dylan-fan side and my movie-critic side can agree is the entire Richard Gere branch of the story. From where I sat, it serves no purpose whatsoever. I think it might be the image of himself that he saw refuge in to get away from all the expectaions the world had of him, but by God don't quote me.

What I'M NOT THERE left me with more than anything else is that being a fan of someone, be they a writer or an actor or a folk musician, requires a certain amount of presumption. When we get attached to someone's work, we entertain an illusion we won't even admit to ourselves, that they're doing it just for us. And when they deviate from a set pattern, we take it personally. And in any case, we tend to dig to deep to try and find the person behind it all. It's interesting, to be sure, but why do we do it? It's counterproductive. Why do we try to get a handle on artists personally? So we can see where they're going once we know where they've been?

But doesn't that take away some of the power of their art? Great art should come as a shock. It should leave us different than when it found us. So does it really do us any good to marginalize and quantify another person so what they do for a living holds a deeper private meaning for us?

JESUS, we got some fuckin' nerve.